The US has 50,000,000 functional illiterates. Whole Word reading instruction is the main cause of our problems.

Parents should teach the alphabet and the sounds at an early age, before schools can instill bad habits.

Use any techniques that capture a child's attention, such as these bouncing ball videos.

Their main value is that they teach: a) left-to-right directionality; b) the concept of syllables; two crucial aspects which tend to be lost in Whole Word.

ABOUT BOUNCING BALL PROJECT:

The technique for making these videos is in development. Putting in the bouncing ball turned out to be a challenge.

This site is meant as a challenge to others: can you create better bouncing ball videos? Please contact us if you can; we'll show your videos here.

OUR GOAL IS TO PROVIDE INEXPENSIVE, READILY AVAILABLE ASSISTS THAT PARENTS AND TEACHERS CAN USE TO SPEED UP THE LITERACY PROCESS--FOR LITTLE CHILDREN, FOR REMEDIAL STUDENTS, FOR ADULTS WHO NEVER LEARNED TO READ.

PROJECT DIRECTORS:

Greg McCall, a teacher in Hawaii and an advocate for Same Language Subtitling (SLS), solved the problem of adding the bouncing ball. His website: sls4reading. Greg comments: "I was drawn to SLS because you can help millions of people at small cost. This is a big trend around the world." More information below. --- ---Bruce Deitrick Price is an education reformer based in Virginia Beach who writes a lot about the reading crisis. His website is: Improve-Education.org. Bruce recalls: "I saw an early example of the bouncing ball idea when I was a kid. It stayed in my mind as the perfect simple device for the teaching of reading."

NOTE: THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL PROJECT. PLEASE CONDUCT YOUR OWN EXPERIMENTS. WHICH VIDEOS ARE MOST HELPFUL? COULD YOU USE "EL DORADO" VIDEO, FOR EXAMPLE, TO HELP A FIFTH-GRADE CLASS MEMORIZE A POEM IN 10 MINUTES? (LET STUDENTS SPEAK WITH VIDEO; PLAY AGAIN AND AGAIN, REDUCING VOLUME UNTIL FINALLY KIDS ARE SAYING IT ON THEIR OWN.) CAN WE USE THESE VIDEOS IN REMEDIAL WORK WITH OLDER PEOPLE--AS A WAY TO BLOCK THE GUESSING AND OTHER BAD HABITS TAUGHT BY WHOLE WORD?

How to teach children to read: First, make sure they can say the alphabet and can identify any letter you point to. (Some experts say that if children can also print every letter, they will automatically learn to read.) Second, tell them that each letter has a sound, for example, A is ahh-, B is buh-, and so on. Explain that if you put the B-sound in front of the A-sound, you get a blend which is pronounced bah. That is the essence of phonetic reading. (Below, see link "54: Preemptive Reading.")Third, children then move to sounding out words. It’s at this point that the Bouncing Ball videos might be especially helpful. They dictate a certain rhythm and pace. Apparently, when children do have trouble with phonics, it’s often because they get bogged down in too many rules. Better to keep moving. On the other hand, it's easy to pause videos and take a moment to explain particular words.

THIS PROJECT TO DEVELOP BOUNCING BALL VIDEOSis one part of a larger interest in creating simple, cheap ways to accelerate the literacy process, especially in disadvantaged homes.PARENTS might not be literate themselves; and they might be ashamed to admit this. How are they going to help their children?THE FAILED METHODS used in schools are especially harmful for the less verbal kids who don't have support at home. FURTHERMORE, charities give books to poor families, but little else to help them take advantage of the books. ELP can help in both situations.

ELP is in development but tentatively includes such suggested basics as: the alphabet song done slowly for young children laminated alphabet place mats (the ABC's) phonics songs bouncing ball videos (as seen here) importance of side-by-side reading A is for Apple laminated sheet (the sounds)

ELP is an Improve-Education.org initiative. See "61: Early Literacy Pack." Also relevant is "54: Preemptive Reading" on that site.

BACKGROUND: Americans typically see subtitles used only on foreign movies. For example, everyone has seen French movies with English subtitles.So it seems counter-intuitive that we might want to put ENGLISH subtitles on ENGLISH movies.But suppose we have millions of Indians who speak English but can't read the printed language.(English is one of India's official languages; so several HUNDRED MILLION people speak but can't read English.) Meanwhile, there are thousands of popular, high-quality movies, TV shows and videos available--so let's put English subtitles on them as a quick way to help these people become literate.That is the educational technique presented at SLS4READING.COM.THE PRESENT: India is where serious study is ongoing. Trials should be conducted here in U.S. When SLS is in use, literacy rates have in most cases doubled.

RECOMMENDATIONS: 1) Find and use quality subtitled media.2) Based on current research, all music videos should probably be required to have some form of Hard (always on) Subtitling.3) SLS can also be effectively used in education settings both as a reading activity and with multimedia projects.._______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________